How athletes join
You choose how registration works:
- Open: one-tap join, no capacity limit and no form. Best for most events.
- Managed: set a capacity, a registration deadline, categories and a registration form. Best when you need to cap the field or collect details.
- Ballot: athletes enter and you run a draw for an oversubscribed event, with an optional reserved quota.
Good to know: if athletes have already registered, switching the joining mode may be blocked to avoid leaving people in an inconsistent state. Decide your mode before opening registration where you can.
Capacity and the registration window
On managed events you can set:
- An overall capacity, and a per-category capacity.
- A registration window: when joining opens and closes.
Creating, building and fully previewing an event are all free. There's no free registration allowance, though: an event hosted by an organiser account can't take any registrations, and doesn't appear in public discovery, until you subscribe to an Event Organiser plan. The plan tiers are set by registrations-per-event (100, 500 or 1000, with a larger enterprise / contact-us option), bought in the app through the App Store or Google Play. Your plan tier is the ceiling on registrations; any capacity you set can only sit at or below it. See pricing for the current shape and billing terms.
Good to know: this is separate from a club's free-member allowance. A team or club hosting a members-only activity isn't billed against the organiser tier at all; a small club is free by the club model instead, with members of an open club joining on their own Aster Plus. See Become an organiser.
The registration form
On managed events you can ask athletes for the details you need when they join (free-text, number, yes/no or multiple-choice questions) and attach a waiver they agree to as part of joining. If your event genuinely needs medical information, you can opt in to collecting it, and athletes give a separate, explicit consent for that health data.
Good to know: Aster no longer collects an emergency contact at registration. The Alert feature notifies the people watching an athlete's ride. It isn't wired to a stored contact, so collecting one added personal data with no purpose. See Alerts and crash detection.
Categories
Categories group athletes (for example "Pro Men", "Open Women", "Under-23"). For each category you can set:
- A name.
- An optional distance (for events offering multiple distances).
- A gender band (open, women, men, mixed or non-binary).
- An age band (minimum and maximum age).
- A capacity.
- A start time, so categories can set off in waves (a category with no time inherits the event's start).
Athletes pick their category when they register. In ranked formats (race, time trial), results are ranked within each category. Spectators see the category list with live registration counts on the event page.
If an athlete withdraws
An athlete can withdraw their own registration before the event. A withdrawn registration no longer counts against your capacity or your plan's registration cap, and shows as Withdrawn on your participant list (see Event lifecycle and rider statuses), distinct from DNS (registered but never started tracking on the day).
Bib numbers
Choose how bibs are assigned:
- Automatic: Aster assigns sequential numbers, starting from a number you choose.
- Self-entry: athletes enter their own number when registering.